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JP Morgan has abundant management capacity to make further bank acquisitions in the US and overseas, with pieces of Citigroup’s international consumer banking franchise a prime target if they were put up for sale, according to a senior executive of the US bank.

In an interview with CreditSights, the independent research firm, Don McCree, executive vice president of treasury, corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions at JP Morgan, said the bank has the capacity to acquire regional US banks and that a potential sale of parts of Citigroup’s international franchise would represent “interesting” opportunity.

Vikram Pandit, Citigroup’s chief executive, this week re-affirmed the US bank’s international scope as its competitive advantage, and indicated that certain consumer businesses such as Asia and Latin America remain an important long term focus of the bank.

However, CreditSights said: “With Citigroup’s minority government ownership and, at times, its difficult relations with the US regulators, we cannot rule out that that Citi’s fate may not be entirely in their own hands."

Potential targets for JP Morgan among US regional banks include SunTrust, Fifth Third Bank and KeyCorp, according to CreditSights, which published a report based on the interview with McCree.

The capacity to make additional acquisitions is as a result of the Bears Stearns integration nearing completion and integration of Washington Mutual proceeding ahead of schedule, McCree told CreditSights.

However, McCree emphasised that he does not think the bank needs to do more deals in order to build out its franchise, as it feels it has critical mass in both consumer and commercial banking, and that any large bank acquisition could in any case by hampered by the fact that JP Morgan had already breached the 10% national deposit market cap.

Even still, CreditSights said JP Morgan feels that if there were an attractive deal that it wanted to get done, it could seek regulatory waivers and/or run off high cost deposits in order to overcome this obstacle.